Come, crown my brow with leaves of myrtle!
I know the tortoise is a turtle.
Come, carve my name in stone immortal!
I know the tortoise is a tortle.
I know to my profound despair-
I bet on one to beat a hare.
I also know I'm now a pauper
Because of its tortly, turtly, torpor.

With turtly torpor Willow Creaky Community Church advances with the times. It is following through on its cutting-edge study:

After modeling a seeker-sensitive approach to church growth for three decades, Willow Creek Community Church now plans to gear its weekend services toward mature believers seeking to grow in their faith.

Reflect with profound despair: if you were twenty years old when you began attending this hot, promising, relevant church, you would now be nagged with junk mail from AARP, and finally somebody got the clever idea to do a study on the effectiveness of its work. Now that your grandchildren are off in college, your local fellowship of the saints has decided to crack open a Bible.

Showers of blessing, Send them upon us O Lord;
Grant to us now a refreshing, Come and now honor Thy Word.

And there's Mark Galli, one of Christianity Today's in-house philosophers asks if this concern for spiritual maturity is not a bit too self-centered.

Which brings us to those "fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ." They are not "being fed," they say. They are not getting enough in-depth Bible teaching. They are so discouraged about the church's inability to help them grow, they are ready to quit. Does it strike anyone else that these followers have missed a crucial part of what it means to be fully devoted to Jesus?

And with an irony that truly satisfies my deepest hunger, I read that Bill Hybels is preaching [May 31-June 1] a sermonette entitled "Have You Died Yet?"

What a shepherd of souls. After thirty years of starvation.

Have you died yet?